Class Warfare

FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT CLASS WARFARE - PAGE 2

Are the states to be the crucible of class warfare in America in the '90s?It won't happen as a Marxian revolt of the proletariat. (We're not likely to see a governor guillotined.) But in state after state, the interests of the poor are on a collision course with those of affluent middle- to upper-income taxpayers. The struggle is coming into bold relief on the issues of budget cuts, diminished urban aid, tax increases and court orders for equal spending among rich and poor school districts.

You know some things never change when the GOP presidential candidate starts criticizing his Democratic opponent for handing out checks to undeserving layabouts who are too lazy to work. Remember Ronald Reagan's "welfare queens" driving Cadillacs and eating sirloin steaks? Or Newt Gingrich's epithet for Barack Obama as the "food stamp president" during this year's GOP primaries? Apparently there's no stereotype too base, no innuendo too thinly disguised that some aspirant to high office claiming to represent the party of Lincoln won't use it to stir up the politics of racial and class resentment.

Probably no single episode did more to assure President Obama's 2012 re-election than that supposedly private fundraising lunch at which Mitt Romney famously declared that "47 percent of Americans" would never vote for him. The remark, unexpectedly captured on video, spread swiftly over the Internet and the airwaves, marking the hapless Mr. Romney in his own words as an elitist icon of the rich, unable or unwilling to comprehend how the other half...

WASHINGTON -- Over the years, every time the Democrats accuse the Republicans of being the party of the rich, leaders of the Grand Old Party scream "class warfare." By that they mean that the nasty Dems are trying to divide the country by insinuating, unfairly, that the GOP cares not a whit about the poor in its zest to help, as the old song of the Roaring Twenties put it, "the rich get richer while the poor get children." We're bound to hear more and more of the "class warfare" lament from the Republicans about the Democrats' greeting of President Bush's $1.6 trillion tax cut proposal.

LOS ANGELES -- I live with the young Patrick Buchanan as I watch an older one run for president for the third time. To explain: I am writing a book about the Nixon presidency, and so I am ankle deep in memos, notes and such written by Mr. Buchanan when he was in his early 30s.He was a tough, opinionated and zealous young man. And he was devoted to President Nixon.But even "the Old Man," as Mr. Buchanan called Nixon, sometimes wanted to rein in his young writer's bent toward aggressive class warfare.

IT LOOKS as though a long-running Abbott and Costello routine in American politics may finally be coming to an end. I hope so. You know the routine - it's about "class warfare." The Republicans push through laws that enrich the rich. The Democrats protest the injustice of such policies. The Republicans then accuse the Democrats of waging "class warfare" - which forces the Democrats into impotent silence, until the next round. Watching over the years how effectively this rhetorical strategy has worked to shield our "them that has, gets" politics has filled me with the same feeling of frustrated rage that I felt as a boy when I saw a brilliant Abbott and Costello routine in one of their films.

WASHINGTON -- The apparent split in the Clinton Cabinet between Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich on the one hand and Treasury Secretary Lloyd M. Bentsen and Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown on the other over the need to cut what Reich has called "corporate welfare" indicates that the administration is wary of initiating another round of what the Republicans like to call "class warfare."Reich coined his term in a speech last week. "If we're asking middle-class people to work smarter and welfare mothers to play by the rules," he told the Democratic Leadership Council, "it seems important to ask Corporate America to get off welfare and play by the rules as well."

American History The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America By Gary Nash. Viking. 544 pages. Much as classes divide society, so does the very notion of "class" divide historians of the American Revolution. Almost a century ago, Progressives like Carl Becker argued that the Revolution addressed not only "home rule," but also "who should rule at home." Other historians, and the public at large, winced at the insinuation that the sacred story of our nation's founding might be clouded by class warfare.

A Columbia man was convicted yesterday of possessing a small amount of marijuana in a case his attorney described as an example of the "class warfare" carried out by the Howard County Police Department.Police targeted 44-year-old Anthony Leo Raymond Sr. in January after going through trash in a low-income neighborhood in Columbia's Owen Brown village. They said they found marijuana stems and seeds in his garbage bags and obtained a search warrant for his house.Eight officers, wearing black battle-dress uniforms and with some carrying machine guns, burst through the front door of Mr. Raymond's home with a battering ram and found portions of three marijuana cigarettes and rolling papers in his bedroom.